Post Truth
Oh, don't look at me like that. This is a blog for heaven's sake: a place where, according to hallowed tradition, people talk shite. And I firmly believe, as the old BT slogan had it (more or less), "It's Good to Talk Shite". Why is it good to talk shite? Well, EM Forster more or less nailed it: how can I know what I think until I see what I say? This is especially true for those of us who, possibly due to some degree of undiagnosed autism, tend to think more pre-verbally than verbally. My mind is not the final pages of Ulysses: my interior monologue hardly ever gets as far as precise words with syllables in them: mostly, it's the music of the words and the pictures that shine through them. And let me tell you, if you happen to be a moribund old git with mild social phobia, pulmonary emphysema, a baggy face and hardly any teeth whom nobody except a masochist would pass the time of day with, this blogging lark is practically the only chance you get to, well, actually say things. And it's only when I've said them that I realize many of them either shouldn't have been said at all, or (more commonly) should have been said differently. So no, this is not where I hope to win friends and influence people. This is me working gamely and patiently through Edison's 10,000 ways of not winning any friends or influencing anyone at all.
Having said that, it does strike me as odd that I find it so easy to say things in Spanish (see other blog, now approaching 1,000 posts, and well over that number if you include all the ones I've reverted to draft status), including a fair few non-shite things, and so hard to say things in English, given that English is actually my mother tongue. Obviously it must have to do with the fact I've spent my entire adult life living in Spanish speaking countries. This, in turn, suggests that language is not just an aseptic "code", a communication protocol like http or ftp, for passing data streams from one machine to another. As a teacher, the protocol part of things, the grammar and morphology and semantics, I actually know pretty well - it's my job to. But language is not just this. It's something that's built on the back of a culture (the source of all the assumptions and connotations which make words sing, or in my case, smell of terminal illness), which in turn requires a community of people sharing that culture. I can't write fluently or confidently in English any more because I don't inhabit an English speaking culture or community and scarcely even remember, through the thick swirling mists of nostalgia, what one actually looks like. All I get is the distorted, cartoon vision that certain social media provide me with. So, yeah. A language without a culture is like teeth without bacteria: too clean. Perhaps that's what's wrong with this blog. Perhaps that's why nearly everything I post stays there for a couple of days and then crawls back into Draft like a defeated, beaten animal, even though as far as I know it's never even been read.
There's also the fact that I'm torn between an urge towards self-revelation on the one hand and shame on the other, you know, the Too Much Information thing. That too.
I need a shrink. Or a Dirty Woman (Floyd). Or a Machiavellian combination of both. All and any of which is about as likely, at this stage, as me growing another set of teeth.
So anyway, yeah, it's good to talk shite, provided you actually know you're talking shite. (Sturgeon's Law comes in useful here.) A blog, according to this vision, is like a mental enema. First, all the crap comes out. Then, you can start getting better. But trying to do this in what is effectively now, for me, a foreign language, isn't the easiest of tasks. So bear with me. At least cut me a bit of slack.
The post truth thing. I have to be honest here. Moriarty thinks the phrase is horrifying, and in a way, I see his point. But I don't know if I entirely agree. His Exhibit A and Exhibit B are the Brexit and Trump votes, respectively. I would have voted for Brexit, had I been there, not because I'm a xenophobe or a flag-waving Little Englander (on the contrary, I favour open borders: as someone who has lived his entire adult life in countries that do not figure on his passport, not to do so would be the summum of hypocrisy, I guess), but simply because I see a democratic deficit in the EU, something even the Remain camp conceded, but didn't consider important (or pretended that this could somehow be "sorted out", when that's plainly not true). It comes down to priorities, in other words, mine being freedom of speech and self-governance and people getting along with each other and less Big Government interference. As for Trump, I find I can accept nearly every criticism of him I've so far seen voiced, yet still find him arguably less awful than the alternative that was on offer. ("Arguably" means I'm open to persuasion on that one. Or on nearly anything, really... I think.)
Now, what I see in these two votes is, OK, a certain amount of bad logic and anti-intellectualism and childishness and facebookery, whatever you want, but also a reaction against the self-appointed elites of yesteryear, and I think that's healthy. It's also, from a certain angle, a bit ironic that so many people who identify as being on the Left, and therefore ought to be against elitism, suddenly now find they're all for it (if we accept, as I think we all can, that paternalistic elitism in scarcely diluted form was what was on offer from Clinton and the Remainers). By elitism I mean the idea that government is something that is best "left to the experts". This is, as far as I can tell, what was at stake in both votes: and I think the right choice was made, in both cases, to say no.
Moriarty complains about Gove saying that the country has "had enough of experts". I assume his interpretation is that Gove would prefer decisions to be made on the basis of emotion, prejudice and inadequate information; I'm not sure that he's right on that. It could well be that Gove meant to express impatience with the sort of "experts" who expect people to trust them simply on the basis of their academic credentials, and to let them decide on matters that concern us all. As far as I'm concerned, blindly trusting the judgment of "experts" is a far worse intellectual sin than simply writing them off en masse as something we've "had enough of": the naivety of assuming that "experts" are wise and impartial and intellectually humble and have our best interests at heart is, surely, the sort of thing that leads to totalitarianism faster than you can say Soviet collectivized agriculture. In political questions, the function of experts is to present the facts as clearly as possible to those who will then make the decision, not to usurp the decision making process itself. I assume - I hope - that that's what Gove was getting at.
However, it's not quite what I wanted to get at here. What I really wanted to do was try to explain why, to me, and absent all the presumed interpretations of the phrase, "post truth" actually has quite a nice ring to it, and describes a society I'd very much like to be a part of.
So, first off, no, I'm not one of those who claim that truth is whatever you want or happen to "feel" it to be. Nor do I believe, as some apparently do, that mutually contradictory narratives can both be somehow "true" at the same time, since it all depends on your "standpoint". Or that "truth" is something we can easily do without and be none the worse for it. It's none of these things. My particular angle is the one I've attempted a few times to put forward in my blogs: the idea that most of us (those who are not geniuses) can only get a handle on reality by simplifying it. Our ideas, certainly when it comes to politics, are abstractions and simplifications pulled out of a bewilderingly complex real world like a valuable object snatched out of a roaring fire and hastily cooled to a point we can touch it. We understand complex processes using simple models. Not just economists, but most everyone, regularly discounts "externalities" in our calculations. And this is nowhere more true than with people (the raw material of politics as well as economics), since our unfortunate wiring as a tribal species leads us to misjudge others constantly, in accordance with various sorts of atavistic prejudice, whether derived from tribal group psychology or from the various mating instincts. And when I say misjudge, primarily I mean underestimate. We're all very good at that.
For me, post truth means post reductionist. It means recognizing that the truth is out there (of course), but that none of us will ever have more than a very partial and imperfect grasp of one small corner of it, and therefore had better be suitably humble. This is not a reason to give up the search for truth: rather, it is a reason to refuse to settle for what we've already found, and insist on always looking further, and be open to surprising discoveries. And when it comes to people, post truth means recognizing that we will never truly know another person, only the very little that person can communicate or chooses to: but that the wonder and splendour and uniqueness of a human life is as present in any other as it is in ourselves. And that, given the appalling complexity of the world we live in, it is simply ridiculous to try to extrapolate from a person's beliefs to his or her moral worth.
Am I talking shite? Probably. I'll have to come back to this when I have less work on my desk. But what it is, really: I'm sick and tired of seeing videos on YT (that clown Molyneux is one of the worst offenders) with the title "The Truth About...". As if "the Truth" about anything could be thus condensed into an effortless ten to thirty minutes of viewing. The arrogance of this apparent belief on the part of some to have some special handle on "the Truth" - well, I live in Ecuador, and half a word is sufficient, probably. I've had La Verdad up to here.
Having said that, it does strike me as odd that I find it so easy to say things in Spanish (see other blog, now approaching 1,000 posts, and well over that number if you include all the ones I've reverted to draft status), including a fair few non-shite things, and so hard to say things in English, given that English is actually my mother tongue. Obviously it must have to do with the fact I've spent my entire adult life living in Spanish speaking countries. This, in turn, suggests that language is not just an aseptic "code", a communication protocol like http or ftp, for passing data streams from one machine to another. As a teacher, the protocol part of things, the grammar and morphology and semantics, I actually know pretty well - it's my job to. But language is not just this. It's something that's built on the back of a culture (the source of all the assumptions and connotations which make words sing, or in my case, smell of terminal illness), which in turn requires a community of people sharing that culture. I can't write fluently or confidently in English any more because I don't inhabit an English speaking culture or community and scarcely even remember, through the thick swirling mists of nostalgia, what one actually looks like. All I get is the distorted, cartoon vision that certain social media provide me with. So, yeah. A language without a culture is like teeth without bacteria: too clean. Perhaps that's what's wrong with this blog. Perhaps that's why nearly everything I post stays there for a couple of days and then crawls back into Draft like a defeated, beaten animal, even though as far as I know it's never even been read.
There's also the fact that I'm torn between an urge towards self-revelation on the one hand and shame on the other, you know, the Too Much Information thing. That too.
I need a shrink. Or a Dirty Woman (Floyd). Or a Machiavellian combination of both. All and any of which is about as likely, at this stage, as me growing another set of teeth.
So anyway, yeah, it's good to talk shite, provided you actually know you're talking shite. (Sturgeon's Law comes in useful here.) A blog, according to this vision, is like a mental enema. First, all the crap comes out. Then, you can start getting better. But trying to do this in what is effectively now, for me, a foreign language, isn't the easiest of tasks. So bear with me. At least cut me a bit of slack.
The post truth thing. I have to be honest here. Moriarty thinks the phrase is horrifying, and in a way, I see his point. But I don't know if I entirely agree. His Exhibit A and Exhibit B are the Brexit and Trump votes, respectively. I would have voted for Brexit, had I been there, not because I'm a xenophobe or a flag-waving Little Englander (on the contrary, I favour open borders: as someone who has lived his entire adult life in countries that do not figure on his passport, not to do so would be the summum of hypocrisy, I guess), but simply because I see a democratic deficit in the EU, something even the Remain camp conceded, but didn't consider important (or pretended that this could somehow be "sorted out", when that's plainly not true). It comes down to priorities, in other words, mine being freedom of speech and self-governance and people getting along with each other and less Big Government interference. As for Trump, I find I can accept nearly every criticism of him I've so far seen voiced, yet still find him arguably less awful than the alternative that was on offer. ("Arguably" means I'm open to persuasion on that one. Or on nearly anything, really... I think.)
Now, what I see in these two votes is, OK, a certain amount of bad logic and anti-intellectualism and childishness and facebookery, whatever you want, but also a reaction against the self-appointed elites of yesteryear, and I think that's healthy. It's also, from a certain angle, a bit ironic that so many people who identify as being on the Left, and therefore ought to be against elitism, suddenly now find they're all for it (if we accept, as I think we all can, that paternalistic elitism in scarcely diluted form was what was on offer from Clinton and the Remainers). By elitism I mean the idea that government is something that is best "left to the experts". This is, as far as I can tell, what was at stake in both votes: and I think the right choice was made, in both cases, to say no.
Moriarty complains about Gove saying that the country has "had enough of experts". I assume his interpretation is that Gove would prefer decisions to be made on the basis of emotion, prejudice and inadequate information; I'm not sure that he's right on that. It could well be that Gove meant to express impatience with the sort of "experts" who expect people to trust them simply on the basis of their academic credentials, and to let them decide on matters that concern us all. As far as I'm concerned, blindly trusting the judgment of "experts" is a far worse intellectual sin than simply writing them off en masse as something we've "had enough of": the naivety of assuming that "experts" are wise and impartial and intellectually humble and have our best interests at heart is, surely, the sort of thing that leads to totalitarianism faster than you can say Soviet collectivized agriculture. In political questions, the function of experts is to present the facts as clearly as possible to those who will then make the decision, not to usurp the decision making process itself. I assume - I hope - that that's what Gove was getting at.
However, it's not quite what I wanted to get at here. What I really wanted to do was try to explain why, to me, and absent all the presumed interpretations of the phrase, "post truth" actually has quite a nice ring to it, and describes a society I'd very much like to be a part of.
So, first off, no, I'm not one of those who claim that truth is whatever you want or happen to "feel" it to be. Nor do I believe, as some apparently do, that mutually contradictory narratives can both be somehow "true" at the same time, since it all depends on your "standpoint". Or that "truth" is something we can easily do without and be none the worse for it. It's none of these things. My particular angle is the one I've attempted a few times to put forward in my blogs: the idea that most of us (those who are not geniuses) can only get a handle on reality by simplifying it. Our ideas, certainly when it comes to politics, are abstractions and simplifications pulled out of a bewilderingly complex real world like a valuable object snatched out of a roaring fire and hastily cooled to a point we can touch it. We understand complex processes using simple models. Not just economists, but most everyone, regularly discounts "externalities" in our calculations. And this is nowhere more true than with people (the raw material of politics as well as economics), since our unfortunate wiring as a tribal species leads us to misjudge others constantly, in accordance with various sorts of atavistic prejudice, whether derived from tribal group psychology or from the various mating instincts. And when I say misjudge, primarily I mean underestimate. We're all very good at that.
For me, post truth means post reductionist. It means recognizing that the truth is out there (of course), but that none of us will ever have more than a very partial and imperfect grasp of one small corner of it, and therefore had better be suitably humble. This is not a reason to give up the search for truth: rather, it is a reason to refuse to settle for what we've already found, and insist on always looking further, and be open to surprising discoveries. And when it comes to people, post truth means recognizing that we will never truly know another person, only the very little that person can communicate or chooses to: but that the wonder and splendour and uniqueness of a human life is as present in any other as it is in ourselves. And that, given the appalling complexity of the world we live in, it is simply ridiculous to try to extrapolate from a person's beliefs to his or her moral worth.
Am I talking shite? Probably. I'll have to come back to this when I have less work on my desk. But what it is, really: I'm sick and tired of seeing videos on YT (that clown Molyneux is one of the worst offenders) with the title "The Truth About...". As if "the Truth" about anything could be thus condensed into an effortless ten to thirty minutes of viewing. The arrogance of this apparent belief on the part of some to have some special handle on "the Truth" - well, I live in Ecuador, and half a word is sufficient, probably. I've had La Verdad up to here.
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